Euclid Telescope Releases Image of Milky Way Bulge With 60 Million Stars

The Euclid space telescope captured an image of the Milky Way's galactic bulge containing 60 million stars, @CBSNews reported. The European Space Agency released the image on Wednesday. The mosaic was assembled from nine photographs taken over 26 hours in March 2025 with Euclid's visible light camera.

Each frame covers an area larger than the Moon. The original black-and-white data received color from separate observations by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral on July 1, 2023, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The $1.5 billion observatory now operates about 930,000 miles from Earth on the far side of the Moon's orbit. Its six-year mission calls for charting one-third of the sky to study dark matter and dark energy. French astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre said the decision to point the telescope at the brightest part of the sky produced an extraordinary result.

The galactic bulge at the Milky Way's center holds billions of stars, he noted. The image includes 51 known planetary systems. It will aid measurements of planet masses already detected and those found later through microlensing, when a foreground star bends light from a background star.

French astronomer Jean-Philippe Beaulieu said nearly 300 exoplanets have been found this way in the past 20 years, all toward the galaxy's center. Euclid previously released images of the Perseus galaxy cluster in 2023 and the Abell 2390 cluster in 2024. The new data will help monitor galaxies and clusters dating back 10 billion years across the full survey area.